Love/Hate: Ace Combat – Joint Assault (2010)

Welcome back to the Ace Combat Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’re headed back to the PSP with Ace Combat: Joint Assault. After the lackluster commercial reception of Ace Combat 6, Bandai Namco went back to the PSP while they tried to figure out where to take the franchise in the cutthroat, blockbuster-heavy skies of the seventh console generation. The resulting game has been one of the more forgotten entries in the franchise’s history, coming out quite late into the PSP’s lifecycle. That said, I found Ace Combat X to be a very enjoyable little game, so could Joint Assault at least build upon that solid foundation? Read on to find out…

Love

• The Soundtrack – To my great surprise, Joint Assault has a pretty cool soundtrack. For most of these games, the music feels pretty generic throughout, but Joint Assault really wants you to take notice of its musical choices. You’ve got all sorts of weird and interesting choices going on, from exotic, atmospheric tracks, to full-on anime hype-rock during one particularly heated moment. That said, it has its fair share of generic tracks too, but there were enough moments that genuinely stood out that I couldn’t help but applaud the game for going the extra mile.
• Improved Plane Customization Systems – You can tell that Joint Assault was a game released in 2010, because one of its key features is the ability to customize your airplanes moreso than any previous entry in the franchise.
  • From a purely-cosmetic standpoint, you can select a custom emblem which appears on your plane in-game. You’ll probably never see it, but it’s a cool touch to add a bit of personalization.
  • Then there’s the expanded part system. While this was relegated to a handful of planes in Ace Combat X, in Joint Assault every plane can be customized. However, certain parts are only available on certain planes, which feels fair and helps balance the system out somewhat. You also don’t seem to need to purchase these parts to use them, so you can just put parts on your planes to tune them as desired.
  • The game also takes a page from Ace Combat 3 and allows you to customize your plane’s primary missiles. The game’s clearly balanced around the standard missiles, but I can see arguments for why you would consider taking the higher-accuracy (but lower flight distance), or the higher-damaging (but more expensive) missile options.
• Co-op Play – The other way that you can tell that this game released in 2010 is that the game has a heavy focus on co-op and multiplayer. All missions can be completed with up to four players. Unlike some games of this era, I didn’t feel like I was being penalized for playing the game solo, so this is just a neat bonus feature if you happen to have friends who also have the game.

Mixed

• Real-world Setting – Joint Assault is the first Ace Combat game ever to explicitly take place in the real-world rather than the Strangereal setting they had been consciously developing for the past decade.* I’m extremely mixed on this. On the one hand, seeing recognizable landmarks like Tokyo tower, the pyramids, or London Eye hits you in a fundamentally different manner than a fictional setting’s landmarks would. It’s also very funny to be told that “you don’t want to crash into a World Heritage site!” Then again, you can get real-world locations from any other flight combat game series, but you can only get Strangereal from Ace Combat. In addition, this game’s story is still as over-the-top and sci-fi as any other Ace Combat game, so setting it in the real-world makes it feel significantly more dumb than it would if it was set in a fictional universe.

*While Air Combat, Ace Combat 2, and Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere all take place on Strangereal, it’s my understanding that this is mostly retroactive. In particular, Ace Combat 3 was originally meant to be a completely new setting, but when they started developing Strangereal with Ace Combat 04, they decided it was based in the setting’s future and included some references to that game’s factions and where they were at that point in the setting’s history.

Hate

• Awful Game Feel – Joint Assault has one fundamentally crippling flaw that renders everything it attempts completely worthless: the game feels like utter ass to control. I am not exaggerating when I say that Joint Assault is the worst-controlling game in the entire franchise. I had already complained about the feel of Ace Combat X, but they somehow managed to make Joint Assault feel exponentially worse.
  • First of all, planes feel incredibly slow and take very wide turns (I checked this in-game and planes were taking around 500m of altitude to execute a simple 180° turn at low speed; engagements in this game take place at pretty low altitudes, so this is actually a significant chunk of your airspace to use up). The flight handling controls have been made even more sluggish and unresponsive, and it feels like every plane is flying in slow motion. It’s bad enough that, at one point, you’ve got a railgun firing on your position and need to get below a certain altitude or move out of its path. This would be trivial work in a proper Ace Combat game, but here you will barely have enough time to get clear because you turn and move so slowly.
  • Making matters worse, the third person camera has been changed so that the camera is no longer fixed to the plane: instead, it loosely follows the plane as it swings back and forth around the screen, at times going into a sort of “over the shoulder” perspective which can make it difficult to tell where your shots are going to land and how you need to maneuver. This just exacerbates the poor controls, making precise handling of your plane difficult. At times it gets so bad that you need to play in first person mode to mitigate the issue, but even then you’re still wrestling to control your piece of shit plane.
  • The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was a special mission where you fly an unarmed Boeing 747 to transport a VIP and end up having to do a canyon run to avoid enemies. It seemed like a cool twist on a classic (albeit somewhat tired) Ace Combat scenario, but the controls completely ruin the entire experience. The plane handles so poorly that, if you attempt to pitch at all, you’ll either careen into the canyon walls or go above 1000m and instantly get shot down by SAMs. Okay, I’ll just have to yaw throughout the whole mission, I guess? Haha, no, the devs have put some very sharp turns in this canyon, forcing you to make a tight turn, and making it so you’re almost certainly going to crash unless you have the patience of a saint. At this point, I was done. I just straight-up dropped the game, it wasn’t worth the bullshit it was putting me through. What idiot designs an arcadey airplane game with flight controls this unresponsive???
• Pay Cheque Deductions – Another new system that Joint Assault brings in is that your end-of-mission rewards are now deducted based on the amount of damage you sustained and number of missiles you fired. What the fuck, game??? I can just imagine the single-digit-IQ people who claim weapon degradation systems are “good actually” jumping to the game’s defense over this. You can argue that it’s more “realistic” or that it rewards skilled play, but I’ll tell you this: I never once played an Ace Combat game and went “man, this game is fun, but I sure wish that my in-game income was getting taxed!” Even if you play like shit during a mission, you don’t lose all that much cash at the end of the day… but still, it’s the principle of the thing. The entire implementation is stupid and unfun, that’s the very definition of a “Hate”-point for these articles.
• Branching Missions – The best part about Ace Combat X was its branching missions system and all the cool little consequences that came from your choices. Unfortunately, this system appears to have become a casualty of this game’s co-op focus, because the branching missions system has been dumbed down considerably. You will occasionally get to choose between two different missions, but are given very little context between them (nor are you really told “hey, you are only going to get to play one of these missions, pick wisely!”). This system might have been fine on its own, but the fact that it’s coming off the back of Ace Combat X‘s much more dynamic system can’t help but make Joint Assault‘s implementation feel utterly disappointing.

Ace Combat: Joint Assault fucking sucks. It takes a few big swings to try to experiment with the Ace Combat formula, but it’s all completely wasted due to the abysmal flight controls. If the game had controlled even a bit better, Joint Assault would have just been “mediocre”, but when the game plays this poorly, it’s nothing more than an exercise in frustration. Like… I think that this game is better than Ace Combat Advance overall, but I at least finished that game, so make of that what you will.

In fact, I am not even convinced that these control issues weren’t an emulation issue on my part. I honestly do not understand why someone would intentionally make the game play like this. I checked and I am 90% sure that the game was running as intended. However, if the emulator was not running the game properly, despite all evidence to the contrary, then this is literally a first for me. If that is the case, then I would be willing to give Joint Assault a second chance, assuming I can correct the problems. However, I can only really go off of my own experience with the game, and in that regard Joint Assault was absolutely infuriating.

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Barloq

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Writer, blogger, father. Blogging since 2012, writing my whole life. Was blessed by the chupacabra and the guardian shepherd.

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